Gower street on a frosty winter morning, when the air is crispy and the neat rows of Georgian buildings are tinged with ice, is a setting of a distinct flavour. Slightly hungover students with round brown glasses and unnecessarily large coats are scurrying to their 9am lectures at the prestigious University College London. The tourists lie-in at their little hotels that smatter the street, waiting for midday to annoyingly bump their way towards nearby Oxford Street, or perhaps peer into the Petrie museum of Egyptian archaeology. As night falls, students re-emerge pouring out of student pubs, loitering to smoke a rolled cigarette or two, as drunken commuters in suits stumble past to get the last train home to their families from Euston Square station. The sweet sense of Gower Street, practically unchanged since the 1700s.

Gower street takes its name from Lady Gertrude Leveson-Gower who supervised the development of the street after she married the landowner of the whole of the Bloomsbury area, John Russell in 1737. Although now it is cherished for its long and largely unbroken row of Georgian terrace houses, it was originally considered to be an eyesore – John Ruskin called it “the nec plus ultra of ugliness in British architecture”. Its strong association with the University College London (UCL) was also established during this period. In fact, the university, which was created to provide an alternative to the Anglican dominated Oxbridge institutions, was nicknamed ‘the godless institution of Gower Street’.

The University College hospital medical students that flocked to Gower Street after its opening in 1833 are said to have invented a “Gower Street dialect” that was formed around spoonerisms (swapping the first letters of two words). Key says were “poking a smipe”, instead of “smoking a pipe”, and “a stint of out” for “a pint of stout”.

Due to Gower Street’s proximity to key central London artery Euston Road, the street is often highly congested and suffers from some air and noise position. Additionally, its prime location and Georgian homes makes it a highly expensive part of London to live in.

Despite being quite a small geographical space, Gower Street has a few developments up its sleeve. Firstly, the construction of a £3.66 million construction skills centre is underway in the former home of Maria Fidelis School. Whilst this is a significant development, the majority of key developments are otherwise focused on transport. Camden’s £35 million West End Project installed footways and a segregated cycle lane on the street, and shifted bus routes off it. It also transformed Gower Street, a previously one-way road, to a two-way street. Last but not least, the arrival of HS2 to nearby Euston Square station is set to bring a thousand more commuters to the area.